Online Public Relations Thoughts

Daily entries on Public Relations and communications ideas and trends

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

How To Ruin Your Reputation, Cont.

This story, if true, is a case study in how to ruin a company's reputation. The allegations are that Dell Computer manufactured faulty computers, sold them to the public then hid the truth about bad components in them. Of course, the story is from one side of a court battle. Dell has yet to weigh in. Still, if internal memos accurately portray what was happening behind the scenes at the company, the culture had gone wrong and senior management hadn't recognized it. In an effort to drive costs down, Dell was sourcing suspect parts then trying to avoid the problems they caused when they failed. This story is a reminder that it is not what you say that counts in PR but what you do. Dell's employees might have forgotten that.